My Deep Frustration With Digimon World 2 | Digimon World 2 ( 2000 / PS1) Retrospective

0:00 [Music] foreign have you ever encountered a task where when you tried to take it head-on you were faced with a feeling a realization that you may be dealing with one of the great Trials of your life and I thought the Digimon World 1 video was an ambitious project now I knew a few things going into this I knew it wouldn't play like the first one like pretty much at all I knew it was a Dungeon Crawler was held down a bit by that old PS1 RPG Jank and I knew it was grinding very grindy I can't just Breeze past this well I got a lot of excited comments from people who couldn't wait for me to get to Digimon World 3 almost everyone who commented on the fact that

0:46 I'd be looking at the second main game in the series including the people that really liked it warned me about this game so you know I got nervous about this one pretty quick but let's not jump to conclusions here maybe I ended up loving this game maybe I formed a pack to destroy every copy of it only one way to find out how this game left me thank you all so much for your patience while I put all this together it's finally time to look at Digimon World 2 for the PlayStation [Music] foreign [Music] there we are Digimon World 2. the box art is a little basic nothing bad but it

1:32 doesn't really stand out in the way the first one did maybe the Japanese one is a little more interesting well I mean it's got more going on maybe a little too much I still might add it to the collection at some point I still think the best box art we gotten was the Japanese box art for the original game and I don't think anything has come close let alone surpass this I'm really happy I got to add this to my collection and that's the only interesting thing I have to say about this I just really wanted to show it off look it's with the trading card now like I said before this game at least mechanically doesn't have a whole lot in common with its predecessor so all that stuff about V pets Evolution branches training developing your home base and how all those mechanics feed into each other that I spent a really long time trying to learn and explain

2:19 throw them all out don't need them from what I've been able to find the first and second Digimon World games were announced at the same time and it stands to reason that they shared a similar development window now what's interesting is that this game was released in July of 2000 in Japan and may of 2001 in the states about a year after the respective releases of those games in those countries but this also slated Digimon World 2 to release the same day that the second Digimon Adventure series started airing in America kind of makes you think there was something to capitalize on for this shared release sort of like you would for a movie tie-in game but no not really the only O2 representation we get in this game is veeamon and his Evolution line and I mean people like veeamon no European release

3:05 this time though which I found kind of odd the first game actually wouldn't release in pal regions until 2002 the year after this sequel came out over here and that Port is actually pretty notorious for having some game breaking issues that would help progression and even make the game impossible to complete I can't help but wonder if maybe that had an effect on the second game getting a wider release in other territories but my Google searches kind of ran dry and I wasn't able to find concrete answers on that at least Digimon World 3 was able to make it to Europe but we'll have to get further into that another day I sure would love to know what was going on behind closed doors though because the direction Digimon World 2 decides to go in is so different than its predecessor and based on their shared announcement this new direction must have been decided on really early on so it begs the question why actually that single word question came up a lot while I was playing this

3:50 game when I said I would be reviewing this game just about everyone told me I should play it on an emulator save states being able to speed up gameplay I even had some recommendations to use a game shark I decided to do not do that I played this game on the PlayStation 3 like I did for the first I've got an original PlayStation and a PlayStation 2 but the PS3 is the easiest to record from with its native HDMI connection and it's still free of any shortcuts I wanted to play and analyze this game as is trying to put myself in the shoes of the kids who played this game back in the day without the ability to skip things or fast forward them this is also partially why I decided to skip the game shark because not every kid had those back in the day I know I didn't I still allowed myself to use Community made guides partially because it still fits the ERA this main guide I would check out for tips every so often was last

4:36 updated in 2002 so there's a very real chance people playing this during its original release period were referring to this guy I still mostly try to rely on my own intuition and sort things out for myself but this guy did come in handy on more than one occasion so big props to segianto Yosef for putting this together I wanted to take a fair and honest look at Digimon World 2. I don't want to ignore the fact that modern tech can alleviate some of the issues this game has those are relevant but the main goal was to actually analyze is what the developers put together here and what the consequences or benefits of those decisions were booting up the game were treated to a pre-rendered FMV and it's a good first impression honestly these Digimon are rendered and animated really well and I kind of have to appreciate how much is going on here there's not as much being done here to establish the world we're in and how much our player character connects to well anything but

5:24 the three on three battles are on full display and there are some references to stuff we'll actually be doing throughout the game at least in Parts some of this feels like it was just kind of here to look cool which you know fair enough but I was waiting for pretty much the entire game to see why they were putting so much Ephesus on this where garurumon like he was some sort of central antagonist but such a thing never actually happens which is especially funny considering they end this scene with some real foreshadowing to something that does come up later I like that moment too whatever this little image here was portraying was in the back of my mind throughout most of my playthrough and I like when a game can do that with its intro we don't waste much time when booting up a new game either our character is already being escorted by a mentor named zudicorn to see one of the leaders of whatever this facility is canonically this boy is known as Akira but I don't want to be

6:09 having painful hallucinations throughout the entire Journey so let's just go with Wayne so it turns out this is our last training Mission before becoming an official Tamer on the Guard team in our home of digital City defending it from hostile Digimon that can be found in the surrounding dungeons or domains this final mission is to go to the boot domain and Destroy Leomon I love it the rule of Leomon Must Die is so tried and true in this series that the first thing we're told to do in this game is to kill him ourselves once we're in the boot domain oh okay wait no uh we actually got to go talk to our mission Chief Carol real quick so she can improve us for a departure probably could have just sent us right to the first area but hey gotta establish some characters in their roles right people don't always move this slowly in this game do they they do all right now we're here in the boot domain and introduced to our main mode

6:55 of transportation when maneuvering these areas our trecy old tank known as the digi beetle no no that that explanation can wait it doesn't take long before we run into our first wild Digimon we don't really have Random Encounters in this so much as we'll run into other Digimon out on the field and once occupying the same terrain you'll take turns moving until you're in a close enough proximity to start a fight I actually do like that this training Mission gives us a trio of Fairly powerful Digimon from zunicorn's Team it's a good teaser a little taste showing us what we can achieve later on with enough effort put into raising our own digital creatures and I also think it's really cute that his Digimon already have nicknames I actually didn't even notice that until going back over the footage battles are handled in a pretty standard turn-based way here and it's kept pretty simple from the outset again a lot to say about this

7:42 but we gotta introduce a few other things first you might actually notice that this game lags a little when you're choosing attacks and such like don't get me wrong it's kind of impressive having these detailed models all on display and animating like this at once but uh [Music] it's taking everything in this game to just make this stuff happen there's a long pauses between everything here and the fact that you can literally hear the game struggling to keep things moving might be the funniest and most fitting thing about this it's also kind of foreshadowing after the battle we're introduced to floor portals which we'll use to move on to the next floor of the domain and we find the Hostile Leomon very quickly this is a pretty effective tutorial showing us the basic mechanics

8:27 while not dragging its feet too much it doesn't show or explain everything trust me there's gonna be plenty more introduced later but it gets the fundamental gameplay premise across both swiftly and effectively with Leomon defeated we return to digital City and are assigned with our own Digi Beetle and even given a chance to name it now let's see here Gunner is fine and all but it's a little basic and not really feeling high wind either yeah there we go squump a name like that will strike fear into all those who hey hey don't you mock me we're also instructed to choose between one of the three guard teams to work under the gold Hawk Blue Falcon and the black sword the main difference here is the Digimon you start with the items your chosen base will sell you and how easy it'll be to digivolve for that team's main specialty as gold Hawk will

9:14 specialize in vaccine Digimon Blue Falcon in nature and black sword will focus on virus Digimon the team specific items mostly revolve around stuff that will help you recruit new Digimon of that specified type or provide Buffs to them there's also literally only matters for the beginning stages of the game and becomes completely unimportant later after you unlock a new area so from there it really just changes the way your bass looks and the music you hear when you come back to get more missions you can't even enter the other bases after you've chosen one until they open all of them up for you in post-game stuff but at that point why bother I chose the gold Hawk I've got a bit of an affinity for the vaccine Digimon and they search you off with an Agumon and I love Agumon there's actually a decent amount of time spent here as you get acquainted with each team as you're required to speak with each of them and they give you little speeches about the

9:59 values of their group and once you've made up your mind you're also introduced to some other teamers around your age those being Bertrand and joy joy Bertrand very quickly establishes he's going to be the token jerk rival for about 10 of the game he's not nearly as important in the grand scheme of things as he thinks he is we also get a rundown on the digi Beetle and again I'm waiting before we get much deeper into that and then finally we can move on to explore a domain properly except how do I oh do I have to talk to this lady every time I want to go outside I can't just get on the elevator and get into the beetle myself like a big boy and this is where the Goodwill of that opening tutorial not wasting your time starts to run out the way a lot of this information is established is very slow and very in its own world that last bit there showing that you'll need to speak to this lady and walk agonizingly slowly to or from

10:46 your Digi Beetle every time that you go to or return from a domain is just a taste of what's to come and a lot of it feels like the game just trying a little too hard to take its world and immersion seriously it's fine when a game really wants you to feel like a part of the setting like you're interacting with it in the ways the characters realistically would but when that continuously comes at the expense of comfortable pacing it becomes less and less of a justifiable priority better make sure you get acquainted with a Tamers Club you'll only have a reason to walk in here like twice I don't even think that's an exaggeration here's the Coliseum here's the Digimon set to oh my forgot about the Digimon Center uh you can come here and trade Digimon not like with friends I don't think just like at very specific stages of the game they'll have really specific Digimon that you have to have a

11:33 very specific Digimon to trade for I think I used it like once and then I totally forgot about it after that and the things I've listed so far that's a small example of that problem in this game so that's the foundation while Digimon have started to act up and occasionally attack digital City and it's our job to travel to the surrounding domains find the later Digimon that's sending them into a frenzy and knock them around a bit we'll be given missions by our team leaders showing us where our next objective is and off we go to save the city when leaving the city we're shown a map of the Overworld it might look kind of empty at first but throughout the course of the game we'll see new locations and plenty of new domains to enter and we can either go into previously conquered dungeons or move on to the current objective domains that

12:19 are indicated with the red border the main bulk of gameplay is gonna see you rolling around in these domains in your Digi Beetle a faithful little buggy that will take you anywhere you want to go in these locations but it's a little more complicated than just hopping into a new area and exploring see that number ticking down that's your EP or energy points your Digi beetle is a machine after all and it has a limited battery life movement around domains is set up like a grid where you move one square in any given Direction at a time and each Square you move costs you one p in the beginning stages of the game this can be pretty daunting your EP can disappear pretty fast and you don't exactly have a lot to spare but you can replenish it while on the field with a little Exploration with a bit of looking around you can find these chests and you'll often find helpful items within them among which can be EP packs that

13:05 regenerate the energy available to your Digi Beetle but this in and of itself can come with a certain risk sometimes these chests can be trapped and cause harm to your Beetle or in some other scenarios they can just be empty and if you're really unlucky you could end up with both happening at the same time this also means that going after chess can be a little bit of a gamble there's no guarantee you'll find an EP pack in there or even anything useful at all and then you're just out of the energy to keep looking around for more on top of that even if it's not your first time in a domain what you'll find within it may not be the same as before because these areas are at least to a degree randomly generated while there are some pretty set layouts for what a flirt can look like which floor has which layout the locations of Chess within them where you you start on that floor and The Traps that are waiting for you throughout its

13:51 corridors will shift within each visit some stuff can be counted on I'm pretty sure each domain has a set roster for what floors and layouts it can contain and where the chest could be it just kind of seems to remix the possibilities to create a sense that you need to be prepared for multiple scenarios that said once you've gotten a decent idea of what possible floor layouts to expect it may not take long for you to chart out the most efficient routes to reach the portal and move on to the next floor or at the very least get a better idea of where chests will likely be just so long as you're paying attention you don't want to get too comfortable with the idea that you know what to expect though there are traps littered throughout just about every floor in every dungeon and these can really mess you up during a run through these areas like I mentioned before your Digi Beetle doesn't just have a limited EP but also limited HP as well and the traps hiding throughout the

14:38 domains can threaten that HP with mines that will cause damage to your vehicle but that's not all they could potentially do land mines may seem obvious at first but both these devices and the track perhaps that can sometimes be found in chess can affect you in several different ways the most obvious is by dealing damage to your Digi beetle with the amount of damage it deals depending on the level of the Trap more on that in a minute you may also find yourself being confused temporarily remapping your directional inputs for a bit until it wears off it also may just paralyze you for a bit this trap feels especially funny to me because it's honestly entirely harmless causing you a little more than a few moments it takes to keep pushing a direction until it tells you you can move again it doesn't even cost you any EP honestly it can feel like a real blessing when you get this effect instead of one of the other ones and given that sometimes these traps can go off without damaging

15:23 anything at all it's nice knowing you're not guaranteed to get screw over if you trip one of these some may not be so forgiving though some traps can directly damage whatever Digimon you have in your team at the time or even break a certain part of your Digi Beetle which could be anything from the arms that it uses to defuse land mines a mini map that you can pull up to track the terrain or your radar which you know allows you to see now you can carry a parts fix that you can use to repair any device that's been damaged like this but if you don't have any on you at the time you'll either have to tough it out and hope you can get by without whatever benefit that part could have given you and finish up the domain or give up return to base and start from scratch there are also some traps and obstacles that will be a bit more obvious like these acid tiles on the floor or these pillars that don't really do anything but obstruct your path Walking On Acid will damage your

16:10 Digi Beetle and these pillars or rocks I guess need missiles to destroy you might also be unfortunate enough to run into spores which are these little energy barriers blocking your way that until you get the proper upgrades you can't see until you've walked into them and they've dealt a pretty significant amount of damage to squump this is not official advice but please name your Digi Beetle something stupid like squant cause if you're gonna get a bunch of pop-up messages telling you that your main mode of transportation is damaged you might as well laugh as often the blow there are three different types of missiles that you can use to destroy these obstructions drill missiles destroy rocks mag missiles take out spores and wave missiles can be used on either in the level of missile that you'll need depends on the color of trap the weakest color for traps is yellow followed by Green then blue purple and finally red representing obstacles that

16:56 will do the most damage to you or require the highest tools to take out now of course all of that wasn't enough to worry about so they managed to fit in something else the bugs while exploring these locations you may find yourself running into one of these little Shadows on the floor or maybe being surprised by what would normally cast it these are pugs they drop from the ceiling infecting your Digi Beetle and causing one of four different effects it triggered every time you move sometimes they only stick around for a couple of spaces leaving your Beetle after causing you a minor annoyance but other times they just won't leave you alone and will stay in your Beetle for a ridiculously long period of time and from what I can tell the time they'll spend in your beetle is entirely random so you can't count on a set time for them to bug you before they leave you also have a chance of this either being kind of

17:41 inconvenient or one of the most annoying possible threats in the game depending on which bug it is a bit bug will start to drain your money an energy bug will set your EP a memory bug can take up a slight in your memory thus making it impossible to recruit a wild Digimon if that's the only free slot that you had available and finally the worst of them all there's the return bug which just might be the most vile thing that exists in this entire game get one of these suckers and it'll start dumping your Digimon sending one back home every time you move so yeah potentially you could get by with just one Digimon being sent home but you could also have all but one sent away before it finally leaves you and in a game that is set up where most battles are three on three this is a sign that you need to just go home recoup and remember to add your Digimon

18:27 back from your server over to your Beetle before you leave because otherwise you'll just re-enter the domain and see that you only have the one Digimon so you gotta go back again talk to this lady walk at the slowest Pace known to man hope your PlayStation doesn't explode while the game lags at the thought of opening a menu and fix your mistake of thinking that you could just move on with your life without jumping through hoops every 15 minutes to get things set up before you can just keep playing the game there's still so much I haven't talked about but I got this to this game's credit it doesn't exactly throw all of this at you and say good luck you do have ways of combating each of these obstacles but just like everything else in Digimon World 2 there is a lot that goes into that let's get scratching [Music]

19:19 something really important to understand early on is that understanding your Digi Beetle and how it works is crucial to your success in this cruel Digital World all of these obstacles and limitations are really intimidating at first but when I started the game I didn't realize just how much you can upgrade your digital Wombo wagon every aspect of your Beetle can be upgraded you'll have to outfit your tank with basic parts your engine determines your HP and your battery determines your EP or how much you can move Ram will give you memory essentially controlling how many Digimon you can carry with your window domain at once your toolbox determines the size of your inventory which is limited so depending on how big your box is you'll need to plan out what and how many items you can take with you just like Digimon anything that isn't currently assigned to the space available in your Digi Beetle will automatically be sorted back

20:05 into the server back in digital city which means again their default location will be on the server and not in your personal inventory unless you picked up that item in a dungeon if you earn or buy an item you have to remember that it's in the server not in your inventory and when you need it including when you need to add parts to your Digi Beetle you have to open up your menu go into the server and transfer the items over before talking to the engineer to install them which is pretty stupid because you will never need these parts anywhere on the field so I don't understand why they can't just be pulled from the server and that can be a lot of different individual Parts too we're not done going over the anatomy of this thing you can install new tires to Traverse over acid tiles arms that can disable mines hands that can disarm traps and chests and sweeps that allow you to see mines bugs and spores where

20:52 they would previously be invisible now walking over acid and taking out mines are simple enough once you've upgraded those parts you never have to worry about those obstacles again but even with the fully upgraded sweeps and hands some chess can still hit you with a trap you just have an increased chance of disabling it and on some very rare occasions in the late game there will still be a couple of spores and mines that are totally invisible but at that point you may have picked up on patterns for their logical placements so you might still be able to avoid them if you've been paying enough attention to the domain layouts some of these parts aren't at full functionality when you install them or at least not at their full potential after installing parts of your Digi Beetle you can also Fork over some bits to upgrade select Parts like your engine and Battery I recommend upgrading the battery first chance you get I was stressing out so hard in the

21:37 early game about having my movements limited so so I felt incredibly relieved to find out that I could upgrade the battery and after giving it a little bit of focus and staying on top of my upgrades throughout the game EP essentially became a non-issue in fact I was surprised by how early on I just kind of stopped worrying about it all together another really really important part you want to remember is a bug zapper I actually got confused by this because I kept picking up different bug zaps throughout the game and tried to use them on bugs that were blocking my way but it just kept telling me that I couldn't because I didn't realize that the bug zapper and the bug zap are two different things I thought the zap was just an abbreviation turns out it was actually the ammunition for the former I was able to use zaps and take them out once the bugs were already in my Beetle but I couldn't zap them before I walked over this Shadow I went an embarrassingly long time without a

22:24 zapper attaching my Beetle and some domain layouts will just plop these shadows in your way directly forcing you into an encounter with them and because I'm stupid and didn't realize I was missing an incredibly important part of my Arsenal I just tanked them praying it would be a memory or energy bug I mean I could even deal with a bit bug but if a return variant enter my Beetle it would just automatically send at least one of my Digimon back home and at that point it basically meant I had to throw out whatever time and progress I had invested at that point and just go back to base now that one particular thing isn't really even a criticism of this game either it's more of like a warning don't be like me you know better and now so do I I just wish I had figured out this very simple solution much sooner because I don't even know how many runs I abandoned because I kept running into bad luck with this issue I didn't know was actually totally in my power to

23:09 prevent I'll swallow my pride on that one but don't you worry I still have plenty of legitimate criticism so throw out this game and what do you mean there's still more Digi Beetle parts to go over some of these are honestly very basic parts that you mostly start out with and while some have upgrades like the radar it's mostly plot specific and will only really be relevant gameplay wise for however long it takes you to obtain a mandatory upgrade and use it to progress to the next part of the game outside of that these are pretty much standard abilities of your Beetle but because they are categorized as individual Parts they can also be damn imaged by traps and unless you think you just don't need that specific ability you'll need to bring a parts fix to patch it up and get it working again you have an autopilot which is essentially your ability to just abandon what you're doing and return to base without needing to enter a portal at the very end of the domain if you were to totally run out of

23:55 EP or HP you're sent back automatically and have to dish out some of your hard-earned bits for repairs but if you notice yourself getting low don't have items to recover those stats and don't want to risk trying to make it to the exit you can also use autopilot to go back free of charge with zero consequences to my knowledge this is a rare case of a part of your ditchy Beetle that cannot be damaged if it can happen it must be super rare because it never happened to me and I just really want to believe this game has at least that one line it won't cross you also have a radar that lets you see what's actually around you a map you can display to track your progress and show you where hazards are located depending on the strength of your sweep and the DM transfer tool that lets you transfer your Digimon from your Beetle over to your server while you're out on patrol and I never used that last one something I did realize at first is that you can

24:41 actually change the size of your map while exploring and honestly I kind of got in the habit of keeping it at full screen it's transparent so you can see through it but it is nice to have a full layout of the domain right in front of you that makes it easier to tell where you are but also where you have or haven't explored yet and which areas you should be careful around and that should wrap up going over the ditch Beetle parts right no of course not we still have to talk about guns from here we're kind of moving into a whole new category of the game we already know about the bug zapper that lets us take out bug nests and the missile gun that we can use to destroy other obstacles but the other cannons are primarily related to battles but before we can get into that topic we should really address what you would think would be at the Forefront of a game like this but as you can see it can get kind of lost in all the dungeon crawling and Digi Beetle

25:27 babysitting still progressing through this game does require that you understand the ins and outs of recruiting and training your Digimon while the Digimon racing mechanics in the first Digimon World could be confusing and foreboding to a first-time player they were very unique and memorable and stood out as something very well Digimon it was unrefined though and definitely needed some work to make the process of raising a digimon maybe not so much easier to do but at least easier to understand what I find funny is that even while this game tries to steer those bass mechanics to a more traditional process of winning battles and gaining XP to level up and acquire new forms and abilities they still found a way to tack on enough extra elements

26:12 to make it feel complicated and frankly annoying so I started with an Agumon cute little guy mascot of the series we can all appreciate him I'm sure I took him with me through the first few domains and had him fight in battles and gain some experience I was wondering if I could Fast Track some stuff by doing some grinding get my guy leveled up and maybe up to a Greymon and just start wiping through some of the opening areas of the game nothing like a little well-earned power trip to put you in a good mood in an RPG right well it's not quite that simple your Digimon can achieve Evolution through leveling up yes and the level that they need to reach to attain that new level is always the same there are no baby or in training Digimon in this game level 1 will always be a rookie level Digimon at level 11 they can evolve into a champion an ultimate at level 21 and finally once

26:59 they reach level 31 they can achieve a Mega Evolution but there is a catch your Digimon have level caps yeah you see that meter at the end of battle showing you how much experience your Digimon needs to level up again after a bit you'll start seeing this instead and I seriously thought this was a glitch the first time I saw it but no that means your Digimon has reached its current level cap and will not be able to level up any further this is where a new mechanic known as DNA digivolution comes in taking two creatures and essentially combining them together to get a new Digimon that might sound familiar to some of you fans of the anime but this works nothing like what you're thinking instead of coming together pooling their strength and combining for a more powerful result they instead come together and result into something weaker DNA did Evolve 2 champion level

27:45 Digimon together and you'll get a level 1 rookie and that will need to be trained up again in DNA digivolt with another Digimon that you also need to level up to its cap and keep repeating the process to raise that level cap and that begs the question how much does this process raise the level cap if you're Digimon well it depends there's a simple formula that determines this enhancement so you start with a base Digimon this is going to be Digimon a and the second monster that you choose Digimon B so you need to add the level of Digimon a to the level of Digimon B divided by five and you'll have your new cap so for example Digimon a is at level 15 and Digimon B is at level 11. divide 11 by 5 and round down to two and yes the modifier always rounds down never up

28:30 add them together and your digimon's new level cap is now 17 and you'll want to train it up to that level and DNA did evolve it with another preferably high level Digimon to continue raising that cap as you might imagine that adds a lot of time to training up your Digimon because you're never leveling up just one at a time I mean thankfully the fact that you always have three on the field means that you're training up three at a time but there's something so wild about the repetitive nature of this whole process it really feels like just inching along achieving a goal just so you can combine the results and raise your goal a little bit more before doing it all over again and you constantly have at least one Digimon that you're training up for the sole purpose of adding to your ability to move forward okay kind of because if you're being resourceful that secondary Digimon can

29:17 have a couple of different effects on the result that you get and at the very least which Digimon that is does matter and I didn't even realize how true that was until later on see when you DNA digivolve two Digimon together the child will actually retain the moves of both parent Digimon no matter what type of Digimon you have they keep them through the generations too so if Digimon a has gone through this process a couple of times they'll continue to just pull these moves and all you have to do is just raise that Digimon up in levels for a chance to add those Legacy texts over to its moveset it also increases their base stats so the more they go through this process passing from one Digimon to the next the more they'll build up a strong foundation for a much stronger creature and every time you DNA digivolve to Digimon together the resulting Digimon will gain one DP which ties to another mechanic you may have

30:03 wondered about so what about branching Evolutions that's a pretty defining element of Digimon changing what they can grow into not only by how strong they get but also the factors in which they were trained well since you're not training every individual stat of your Digimon the way you were in the first game this is controlled by DP once your Digimon has reached a high enough level to ditch evolve how much DP they have available will alter what they evolve into so if you have a patamon but it only has 2dp or less you can evolve it into a ninja mod once it reaches level 11 or a star mod if it has between 3 and 5 DP but if it has 6 or 7 DP it can be evolved into a wizardmon and finally evolved it at level 11 with 8 DP or more and it will become an anjumon and from there each of those Digimon can have variations on what they can turn into depending on their DP level I want to

30:49 shout out gamefaqsuser.com the second for posting this chart that lays out the evolution patterns in a really simple and readable way I'll link it down below if you think you'll find it helpful but kind of like with the first game there is a kind of fun element to not always knowing what your Digimon might evolve into depending on those factors and when you've got more Digimon in your party at a time it can be especially fun to fill out a team of various Monsters the whole process can feel so exhausting though it's this tedious back and forth all the time and you want to try and keep these three main Digimon that you're trying to power up with good text DP and of course higher level caps it's hard to let go sometimes you work so hard trying to get one Digimon built up really well and then you're faced with the fact that you can't keep moving forward unless you send that Digimon back to the blender and grind them down to a weaker form to

31:35 repeat the grind for the sake of what would otherwise be normal progression this can make you feel especially better if you've been going around naming all your Digimon after your friends such as Nick Gilly Cyrus Channel pup Trav mcgai Naveed and I spelled his name wrong because I'm a bad friend Mykonos fan golden bolt who died in his first battle Brendan Hess Dr lava Naveed again okay I'll actually try spelling his name right this time unless I'm typing too fast and accidentally add an extra letter at the end and I hit confirm too fast now Trey Nobles Aunt dude Nick again and he's always such a pretty dinosaur did you Manda Batman Miss fushi Cullen Booker please understand I had a good reason to name this thing after you this ends up kicking so much at Mini Me and Naveed and I actually spelled his name right this time

32:21 naming all my Digimon like this probably didn't make a whole lot of sense because it really does feel like this game is specifically designed for you not to get attached to your Digimon on a level not even comparable to the first title it makes half the Digimon you train feel like a means to an end like something you need to use as a resource to feed your favorite child not like they matter as much on their own and it's kind of sad you know at least they do matter to a degree I mean if nothing else you do still want to consider what kind of Digimon you're recruiting because they can't affect what Digimon your parent Digimon will result in Digimon Digimon Digimon saying that word a lot today now this whole thing is weird and it feels like I never really got a full grasp on how it works but from at least my own experience it seemed like parrot a in a DNA digivolution it mostly affected the base level that would have its cap

33:06 increased and parent B seemed to be the primary factor resulting in what Digimon the child would become in the early stages of the game your guild is only capable of DNA digivolving certain Digimon and you might be mostly tied down to the specialty you chose but before long you'll unlock an area that lets you just DNA any Digimon together and that's pretty much all I went for after that it really did just make the home base the place I went back to for Missions that's pretty much it it's not always a hard locked rule though some Digimon types will just take priority over others like if you have a bug digitama line involved in your DNA digivolution you're probably getting a bug Digimon out of it I've done my best to try and make these Digimon videos as in-depth as I could get them so it's with no small amount of regret that I have to say this part of evolution is something that I just don't fully

33:53 understand I think I just got lucky in the later parts of the game with being able to get the result Digimon I wanted by trying to choose parent b as the line of Digimon I wanted the child to become once again I'll link to a guide made on game facts by user dogchi but yeah just look at this I could feel my brain shutting down just looking at it thankfully again if you want to bug Digimon and trust me there's one in particular that really comes in handy it might be best to keep bug type creatures for one particular Digimon and its resulting Evolutions because it can be kind of tricky to break from that line of evolution but I do think the krabmon line of Digimon is one of the few that can be used as parent B to result in something not bug related and from there it has an easier time DNA digivolving into different lines sorry if all that is really confusing I know it's a lot likewise the form they hold will affect what level your Digimon will DNA did

34:40 evolve down to so if you DNA did evolve to Champion Digimon together or really if you have a champion involved in that mix at all your results will be a level 1 rookie Digimon if you've used to Ultimate you'll get a level 11 champion and two Mega level Digimon will results in a level 21 ultimate so you can see why it's usually really beneficial to try and obtain higher level Digimon because not only will they DNA digivolve down into a stronger form cutting down on the time you need a level grind to get them back to higher strength you'll also raise their level cap higher but there are also benefits to racing certain lines of Digimon from the ground up largely because of their tags now an important aspect of gaining new text is that they're locked behind leveling up even when you have a lower level Digimon that results from a DNA Fusion you can still reacquire those Legacy texts their parent had but only after leveling up

35:26 and you have to do that a few times before you can get all of them back this is why it's really important to evolve your Digimon when they're ready for it but that's just the thing yeah they don't just evolve when they hit the appropriate level you have to evolve them with the help of one of those Evolution specialists in one of the main Hub areas which means you have to leave the domain you're currently exploring and go digivolve because if you level up again while it's still in slower form you're just missing out on higher stats in new techs that it could be getting from that form there is no benefit to trying to keep leveling up a lower form Digimon trust me I tried it out and it's just a waste of time so it really begs the question as to why this kind of basic Evolution can't just take place out on the field now DNA did you evolving I get because Yeah by all means you do not want that to be automatic because you really got a plan for that but this it is just fully exclusively

36:13 and actively detrimental and I hate it and you really don't want to miss out on obtaining new texts especially from certain Evolution lines see each Digimon has a certain Tech assigned to them sometimes too and the benefits these can have in battle vary quite a bit but if you're catching what I'm building up to here that means there are some very helpful texts that are exclusively held by certain Digimon and you'll want those creatures on your team so you can DNA digivolve them with the main Digimon and create a strong and useful move set do not underestimate how important this is the texture Digimon are able to use can have a huge effect on your ability to progress through some portions of this game comfortably often to circumvent the text of opponents and that of course brings us to how to recruit new Digimon to your team after all you only start with one and you're gonna need more than

36:59 a few to recruit and train if you want any that can actually hold their own in battle foreign like I mentioned before your Digi Beetle comes equipped with a shooter gun a special Cannon you can use to fire ammunition that can destroy certain obstacles but its uses don't stop there as you explore the domains scattered across the digital Frontier you'll see Digimon walking around you'll need to offer them gifts to earn their favor and recruit them to your team now the types of gifts you offer matter as you'll want some that are catered to the specialty of the ones that you're trying to recruit and at first you can only purchase gifts from your guard team base and they'll only be helpful for the specialty of Digimon your team is based around but you can also find some hidden in chess and if you find toy gifts those can be used to persuade Digimon of any specialty and of course these gifts all have different ranks of Effectiveness

37:44 now I'm gonna give the game the benefit of a doubt and assume I wasn't paying enough attention when this whole thing was explained but I didn't realize at first that you can't shoot these gifts at enemy Digimon when you're in battles you know even though you're using that same gun to send healing items and such at your active Digimon while in battles but hey whatever no you have to send this to Digimon while you're still in the field here's the thing rooms that are counted as active movement zones for enemy Digimon will have different floor tiles than the floor tile surrounding those rooms so you can always tell which areas they can actually move around in and in turn the floor tiles that you need to also be on if you want to actually interact with them when you're sharing these spaces with them you can hit the square button to check their stats so you can see which Digimon I'll make up the team represented by the model that's on the field their respective Specialties and their levels

38:30 anything you do in here beyond that is counted as a turn be it moving a tile or shooting a gift and every time you take an action they'll start moving closer Well normally there are some Digimon that will actually go out of their way to avoid you but that's pretty rare so don't count on it the strength of the GIF you use determines how much this little heart about the wild Digimon grows when they accept it with lower level Digimon being pretty easy to please but stronger ones will be much pickier and take either much more gifts or much stronger ones sometimes a small mix of the two but again every time you shoot a gift they're getting closer and if they get close enough a battle is automatically engaged so regardless of how many gifts you have stashed in your limited inventory at the time you still have a limited amount of terms to win over the digi hearts of these Digi jerks and it doesn't help that sometimes you can toss one of these out of wild

39:15 Digimon and they could just play hard to get by ignoring it entirely these things are expensive you little twerp if you don't want it give it back and it also doesn't help that sometimes these guys are just hanging out rooms that are too small to even try to recruit them in like sometimes you'll see a digimon you really want but you can't even move into the room without getting attacked by them so yeah you're not adding them to your team even then I kept forgetting which size and color of Hearts was a guaranteed success for recruitment so there's a whole portion of the game where I kept running through a domain trying to recruit a skullgreymon thinking I had successfully won him over and then winning the fight only for him not to join me and just being super confused it was all very sad oh yeah that's the other thing once you've gotten a full heart gauge from them you need to beat them in battle but you can only choose to recruit one of the Digimon in the enemy team which is determined by whichever one you knock

40:00 out last from there you also need to have an empty slot in your Digi Beetle's memory that isn't being invaded by a memory bug or they'll just say peace and leave and you'll have wasted all those gifts and effort and time so please make sure that you actually have room for them these are usually going to be your parent bee fodder 2. sure some of them do have helpful texts but their level cap usually stops them from leveling up right before they would be able to evolve and you're not getting any more text out of them so it's best just to get them to their cap DNA did evolve them and add those helpful abilities to your pool and you'll be doing this a lot this is why it's good to pay attention to the text at the Digimon you fight while you're out and about if there's an enemy out there with an ability that annoys you like confusing your Digimon or making themselves untargetable for a few turns recruit them gather as many

40:45 annoying texts as you can and stuff them into your main team of Digimon because after a while you can create some really broken stuff and I'm telling you this as somebody who should have done that I spent a lot of time getting juggled by Digimon that could confuse my team which is a really really annoying sass effect because it means your Digimon will always all always attack either themselves or a teammate and whether or not they snap out of it seems pretty random and you just may not have the atoms on hand to dispel that ailment it just might last the entire rest of the fight and you can't do anything about it and if you're saved in a boss fight with no more healing or status recovery items you're stuck and you cannot Escape oh and don't lose fights it's one thing if you lose EP or HP in your Beatle out in

41:31 the Overworld but if you wipe out in a battle it is game over and back to the title screen you go back to whatever last save you made wasn't considering you can only save your game inside cities or in the map and never in the domains themselves was it really too much to ask for a one-time save station outside boss rooms or something we're talking potentially hours of progress depending on which domains you've been exploring and how much grinding you've been doing in them and it's like the game isn't even that hard necessarily but there's definitely a degree of trial and error in some of these combat encounters here and if you just don't have good items or texts available to deal with certain opponents you just wasted a lot of time and now you just have the funnel ability of starting over there is an element of gratification that comes from encountering an obstacle in battle like this and figuring out how to overcome it

42:17 like a party lineup that took me out in one fight had a digimon that was able to heal its party members faster than I could damage them and with some good hits and of course a confusion says from its teammate I was wiped out but as I discovered that Digimon will only start using their healing Tech if one of their Partners has already been knocked down so if you go after them first and bring some items that can cure confusion this fight is over in a Flash I did like stuff like this learning how certain texts worked figuring out their special effects learning strategies that helped me win battles that at first seemed really tough and figuring out which abilities made me especially formidable against my opponents after a while I started to notice intricacies of the combat and there was a little more here than I anticipated like you can instruct your Digimon to guard during battles but this also doubles as a way to regain 10 of that digimon's MP which can be really

43:03 helpful if you've been using a lot of the more powerful tags there are texts that specialize as counter attacks like rareemon's Buffalo Breath it can be used as an attack but if an enemy attacks the user before that Tech is initiated it automatically becomes a counter-attack and in this state it will inflict confusion but if you have a digimon that's used a Support Tech on themselves like invisibility making it impossible to Target them that turns your Digimon into a safe monster to use to take out raremon because that counter-attack can miss and make what would normally be a really irritating move useless for that opponent another interesting effect is let's say a digimon does counter-attack a teammate out of its confusion well if the Ally day attack is also using a counter-attack Tech being attacked by their friend will still trigger that counter-attack to fire at an enemy with

43:50 the special effect in play what's really funny is in stuff like that Buffalo Breath example this sort of stuff can be used strategically as there are also texts that can be initiated to use friendly fire on an ally that can be used to force a counter-attack on an enemy with a special effect but if you Whittle down the counter-attacker's HP low enough that friendly fire tech can just completely backfire and take out the support it's really funny and it happened more than once during my playthrough stuff like this can make encounters more than just a button Masher especially since you do need to be paying attention to your damage output because you do need to choose which enemy your Digimon is attacking and if your Digimon is set to attack someone specific that gets knocked out before their turn they'll just miss you know in most turn-based RPGs when you're facing a group of enemies in one of your party members is set to attack an enemy

44:37 that gets knocked out they just switch targets to the next one on the list but that just does not happen here and I do not know why this is a thing it's so simple and annoys the hell out of me it's like your Digimon has no object permanence and just fires off into the void not realizing their previous target has already been put into a coma there's also Interruption attacks that can be activated when an enemy is about to attack thus interrupting theirs and you might just be able to knock them out before they're able to move at all you yourself can also get involved to some degree from your Digi beetle with the use of cannons the shooter gun can be used to send items to your Digimon that can help them recover HP MP or recover from a status effect you can also use the Z Cannon eventually to shoot ammo at enemy Digimon these usually don't do a whole lot of damage but it is nice to be involved in some way and sometimes every little bit of damage counts you also

45:22 have your R cannon that lets you fire Ray bombs these things affect the entire field your Digimon included but the effects are lowering or raising offense or defense but only for Digimon of certain Specialties now you want a really good Tech I think is downright essential this is where Booker the akumon comes in see akuaman has this absolutely nasty Tech called Duo scissor claw which not only attacks the entire enemy party but also drastically lowers their defense making the opponents easy picking in the next turn for your team to take out it's a good move but it took a pretty long time before I was actually able to obtain it and that's just the thing a lot of this stuff is fine on the surface while there's a lot here there is the makings of a decent dungeon crawling RPG the problem is that there's this much

46:07 going on in a game that has absolutely no sense of pacing whatsoever let's get struck [Music] so that's the main meat of the gameplay yeah it only took us that long to get it all down I know but the challenge comes from more than just coming to grips with how everything works and plays into each other it also comes from the gameplay Loops that spawn out of all of this and how they're dished out through the course of the adventure at the beginning of the game you're just now trying to calm down wild Digimon in the surrounding domains but along the way you'll also want to recruit new Digimon to add to your party not just to have a full team to take on battles efficiently but because of the long-winded way leveling up in Evolution's work of course at the outset your digibita won't

46:54 have very Advanced parts and you'll need to conserve your movement a bit you also won't be getting a ton of experience or bits from Battle so you have some early grinding to get out of the way here to pull resources and gain some experience now the missions you get sent on usually revolve around exploring and completing a particular domain but sometimes you'll also be tested with clearing a few at a time so one Mission might be done pretty quickly but the next might take three or four times as much effort to clear before you assigned your next mission and that's obviously all while maintaining your secondary tasks of figuring out which Digimon you want to recruit running around to level them up and then of course abandoning your current domain-based Quest so you can go back and take care of basic digivolution and in the case of DNA digivolution it means you're down to Digimon and left with a much weaker one and you'll need to spend even more time grinding to get them strong enough to actually help you

47:40 progress again you may be seeing how a lot of this can start to feel like it's stacking up early on but don't you worry we're just getting started after a while you discover there's another group of humans out there that are in your way actively trying to rile up the wild Digimon and sabotage digital City all while trying to locate certain artifacts these are the Black Knights and they're kind of mysterious at first but they quickly become your main Rivals as they invade the domains and trying to locate several devices they need to reach somewhere you're not the only one out there hunting these guys down either as other Tamers from the city have also been sent to take them out but the others have a special frequency used against them that confuses them and turns them against you it doesn't affect you since you picked up an item from a friend that blocks the frequency from reaching your beetles so you'd think the rest of the crew would like wear

48:26 earplugs or something so this adds some additional boss fights to some of these domains too because you'll need to knock the sense back into your allies before you can continue to take out the Black Knights and sometimes it can be a few of them spread across several floors in a single domain that might sound like a hassle but I actually kind of liked it when this sort of thing happened it was honestly just more interesting and engaging than how normal domains would play out and you could take this sort of thing on at your own pace to some degree if you beat any of these confused allies they return to base and won't be there again the next time you travel through here so you don't have to do it in all one big Gauntlet still these aren't the only extra tasks that get tacked on emissions like this as sometimes you'll discover new little hubs like the meditation Dome where an antimon has built a sort of sanctuary for Digimon who have haven't lost their minds and become wild or there's a mission where you need to track down this Kim

49:12 character who stole parts from the City's power generator but once you catch up with her and meet her at her home in the device Dome her sister reveals that they needed the parts to develop a new radar system and return to what she needed and also provides you with a new cord that you can use to update the body of your Digi Beetle you would think she could just send a text or no wait uh late 90s shoot us an I am and let us know that she needs this junk this conflict was entirely unnecessary not to mention this is also where you buy more advanced ammunition with more and more becoming available the further you progressed through the game oh and that's right at certain points in the game you can earn new cores for your Digi Beetle which allow you to install a stronger body the bodies will usually need to be purchased separately but stronger bodies will allow you to apply more advanced parts to the beetle as well I bet you thought we were done explaining everything that went into the digi beetle and and we are now I mean

49:58 that's that's everything for real this time I think and the game is just really good at finding new ways to slow down your progression and at times it feels like it can come from the game's desire to take its world and inner workings a little too seriously so for an example when you first find out about the blood Knights a higher level security is put on digital City so every time you try to exit or enter your headquarters an extra bit of Animation plays where the guard of the room has to stop and check your ID to verify your identity this happens every time you come or go and because everything and everyone moves three times slower in anything related to cut scenes this is not a swift break in your pacing and it's gonna keep happening until you complete this Mission which consists of conquering three separate domains this is a small thing every time

50:45 it happens but it happens so much that it becomes an egregious example of the game's storytelling actively getting in the way of play oh and then there's a few times in the game where you finish up a mission but before you can go get a new one you'll have a character stop you and request a few very specific Digimon that they need for something if something bad were to happen to Ben old man I wouldn't exactly weep over his Misfortune hey so I'm just chiming in real quick from the editing corner to say that I gotta bring up a couple of things I mean this is what I get for taking bad notes and then uh you know trying to write a lot of my script from memory so Ben Oldman is not the one who sends you on this stupid batch Quest where you gotta go get three different Digimon from other domains that you've already completed and it takes longer than it should no that would have been Professor piatt

51:31 who you actually need to talk to to find the archive Port where Ben Oldman resides so you actually have to deal with Professor Pia first and then go deal with Ben Oldman who then sends you on another fetch Quest or just at least strings you along where you have to go on a fight against him to prove yourself before he can actually help you move forward in the game so I'm not gonna

…